‘I was insanely jealous of Britney Spears’: Billie Piper on teen pop stardom, the fun of her drunk years – and making darkness funny

“Hang on, I’ll just lock the door,” says Billie Piper. She is looking a bit goth, with black hair and black nails, though her neck is wrapped in a delicate scarf; she has not quite shaken the remnants of the definitely-not-Covid flu she’s had for the last few days. “I find it so weird doing interviews in front of people,” she says. “It’s so cringe. I guess if you can completely emotionally disconnect from people around you, then it’s fine, but I just find it very tricky. Anyway. So we’re in the bathroom. Hahaha.”

Piper is now 40, and has been in the public eye since she was 15. First, she was a pop star, and is still the youngest person to debut at No 1, with her 1998 earworm Because We Want To. Then, in 2003, she became an actor, winning plaudits in Doctor Who as the Doctor’s companion Rose Tyler. Throughout, she has been a fixture of the tabloids, her two marriages followed with gruesome interest, her ups and downs tracked through a paparazzo lens.

Acting is her bread and butter, but since 2016 Piper has moved into another, artier mode. She wrote and directed her debut film, Rare Beasts, in 2019. For anyone expecting light fluff, its vicious and surreal version of an “anti-romcom” might have been a bit of a shock.

But she is here today to talk about the return of I Hate Suzie, the extraordinary series she co-created with the playwright and Succession writer Lucy Prebble, which follows the misadventures of Suzie Pickles, a former teen pop star turned beloved sci-fi actor, whose life falls apart under the combined weight of fragile egos, untrustworthy people, tabloid intrusion and a dogged self-destructive streak. Piper has spent much of her adult life dealing with being “tabloid fodder”, as she calls it, though she has previously rejected the idea that I Hate Suzie is autobiographical. Even so, she has had 25 years to work out how she feels about fame, and I suspect she knows what she is talking about.

She settles down on the floor, back against the door, and attempts to get comfortable. We were meant to meet in person, but due to various issues, train strikes and illnesses, we’re having to do it like this, laptop on Piper’s knees, next to the cubicle in the studio of today’s photoshoot. It feels appropriate, somehow, given I Hate Suzie’s frankness. When the show returns, for a three-part Christmas special, Suzie is attempting to rehabilitate her public image by going on a Strictly-esque reality TV show called Dance Crazee. “I pitched the idea to Lucy a couple of years ago, because I wanted to dance,” she says. Back in her pop days she was a brilliant dancer, as YouTube can attest, though she has spent a long time “shirking” things that remind her of that era. For this, she worked with the same choreographer she had when she was a teenager. “I realised I feel so happy when I’m dancing, and it’s something that I just never do. I don’t even do it in a partying way. I just don’t do it any more. So it was a beautiful thing,” she says.

She has never been asked to do Strictly, and says she would never sign up. “What’s good about doing this is that it feels like I’m getting to do Strictly without having to do it,” she says, though she watches the show with her daughter, Tallulah, who is three, and used to watch it with her sons, Eugene and Winston, who are 10 and 14. “It’s really the only one I go for.”

Through the I Hate Suzie kaleidoscope, though, the world of glitterballs becomes a nightmarish, highly pressured fever dream. I tell Piper that I found it very stressful to watch, though she says she’s not sure everyone will see it that way. Before Sky picked it up, the series was turned down repeatedly by networks who objected to the character’s “unlikability”. “On the surface, it’s a woman, a celebrity, trying to win back the hearts of the public through going on a reality show and trying to dance as well as she can,” she says. “But thematically, you’re dealing with some big things, which is what Lucy and I love to do.”

Deep breath, then, because I Hate Suzie Too has its hands full of big things. “There’s abortion, there’s a lot about motherhood. You’ve got one woman who has a child, but also had abortions, and another who is going through the very punishing experience of IVF.” During the first episode, there is a matter-of-fact depiction of a termination, and it is as stark and plain as I’ve seen on screen. “I think it’s important to show things authentically. I know for a lot of women, having an abortion is deeply traumatic. But for some women it is, ‘This isn’t right for me, and I’m going to do it.’ I think it’s different for everyone.” They started writing the abortion storyline two years ago, before the fall of Roe v Wade in the US, before famous women began discussing their abortions publicly, as a political act. “Now it feels like we’ve deliberately plotted this in light of what’s been going on in the world politically. But it’s playing on all of our minds. I’m glad we kept it in, and that we had support to show it in the way that we’re showing it.”

There is another big theme running through the show. “There’s this stuff about women being called crazy generally, but also in the public eye.” She seems hesitant as she tries to work out what she wants to say, without giving too much away. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’ve followed a protagonist – women who we call crazy or who do tragic, deemed-to-be ‘mental’ things – by the time you get to the behaviours that frighten people, would you think they were crazy? Or would you completely understand how they got to that point? And would their behaviour actually seem kind of reasonable and inevitable, somehow?”

When they were planning the series, Piper and Prebble thought about women in the public eye. “We talked a lot about Britney Spears and Caroline Flack and Amy Winehouse. Obviously this stuff has been going on for years, but it’s the more contemporary stars who have had what people call a public meltdown.” Piper never met Spears, though they were both pop stars at the turn of the century. “My career was dying out as she was hitting megastardom,” she recalls. “I was insanely jealous of her, but also loved her and was a fan. But our paths never crossed.”

Piper says that, in this season, Suzie’s story becomes “very uncomfortable”, though anyone who has seen the first will wonder how it can get worse. “But it also has to be funny, and I think it’s a great tonic that there’s so much dancing. You can have all of these big, threadbare emotions, and then do a nice dance.”

That seems to sum up Piper nicely. She admits she has a public-facing side. “People who know me really well say I’m different when I’m operating in that world. My kids will always pull me up on that. They say I sound different, or really formal, or really posh. But as I’m getting older, I feel like it’s happening less, which is probably a healthy sign.” Even in her private life, though, she says she is guarded. “I think that’s just one of the slightly depressing side-effects that come with being famous from a young age, or just famous at all.”

I Hate Suzie makes fame look awful. In her experience, is it? “Fame is awful,” she says, bluntly. “It’s gross. It’s such a dark thing. And it will change your everyday experience of life in a way that is depressing, frankly, in my experience of it. When I imagine some of my happiest, and my freest times, most of them are pre-fame.”

But you were famous at 15, I say. Are we talking about before then? She laughs. “Not to be down on my kids! I’ve obviously had deeply meaningful experiences with my children, and they made me happier than anything, and that’s the truth, but I also really cherish the memories of not being famous.” She shrugs. She explains that fame, at whatever level, changes the way people behave around you. “If you’re treated well, it’s disproportionate. If you’re treated badly, it’s disproportionate. There are very few people who can be normal around it, or normal around you. It makes for a very warped world. I love what I do professionally, but I also like not being too close to the shininess of it.”

In that case, the question most people would have is: why do something that keeps you in the public eye? She sighs. “Yeah. It’s annoying because I love creating things. I love production. As I’m getting older, I’m enjoying making things from the ground up more and more and I think probably in the future, I’ll act less and less. I love what I do.” She pauses. “But I’m tiring of the nonsense of it all. To be honest, I have been since I was 19. It felt quite poisonous from a very early age. Now I’m so grateful that I had those experiences a long time ago, and now I can pretty much entirely focus on the work, and not the bullshit.”

If anyone is familiar with the bullshit, it is Piper. She was born in Swindon and went to the Sylvia Young theatre school in London, where one of her schoolmates was Amy Winehouse. When she was 14, she signed a record contract, and began living alone in a London hotel room soon after. Between 1998 and 2000 she had three No 1s, got two Brit award nominations and released a platinum-selling debut album, Honey to the B. Unsurprisingly, though, there was a dark side to being a teenage pop star. “It felt desperate and lonely,” she told Desert Island Discs in 2021.

Piper’s elder son is now the same age she was when she was getting ready to launch her pop career, which means she has been thinking about that time again. “I just don’t know in what world anyone thought that was OK,” she says. She laughs, but is steely. “I know how unbelievably dead set on it I was, and how precocious I was. But really, it’s just so – it’s so young.” Was there a sense that your family, for example, didn’t know the world that you were getting into? “Nobody really knows what that’s going to be like. There was no model for it. And it was normalised very quickly, so everyone just gets carried along with it. And everyone gets seduced by it, myself included. So I didn’t have any hard feelings towards anyone about it.” Besides, she says, she was quite good at getting what she wanted, and back then, she really wanted to be a pop star.

Has she grown better at dealing with the effects of that time? “Ummmm,” she says. “I guess I processed some of it, because my allergy to looking at myself from that period has completely changed. There were years when I couldn’t even see a video I did, or hear a song I did, and not have some adrenal reaction to it. I couldn’t sing any more. I would really take offence to people playing my songs in a fun and ironic way, it would sketch me out. I didn’t feel in any way connected to that person. Like, total dissociation. And I don’t feel like that any more.” What shifted? “I don’t know, really. Age? Time? Therapy?”

Now, she can at least look at her pop past again. There is the dancing in I Hate Suzie Too, which put her into a dance studio for the first time in years. Recently, Piper starred in Catherine Called Birdy, a lovely period teen movie directed by Lena Dunham, who felt that Piper could put a twist on the archetypal “English rose” mother character. “I have long loved Billie’s work as an actor,” Dunham tells me. “She’s funny, brave, angry, complex and beautiful. When I met her, she was somehow even better.”

It turns out that Dunham was also a fan of Piper’s pop days. The director first heard the single Honey to the Bee on MTV when she was a teenager, on holiday with her parents in the UK. “I came home convinced I’d found a hot new indie artist. In my defence, she always had that energy,” Dunham says. She used the song in Catherine Called Birdy – there is a brief moment when a medieval-ish reimagining can be heard. “Lena said she really wanted it in the movie, and she really wanted me to sing it,” says Piper, with a smile. “Which was a bit … that was a step too far.”

* * *

When her pop career fizzled out in the early 00s, Piper made the move to acting, which is what she had always wanted to do. “I was kind of naive about that next phase of my career, which was useful, because you’re not as scared of rejection. But there was loads of rejection.” She had a lot of “baggage” to get rid of, she says. “A lot of it was just tabloid fodder, rather than, ‘Oh, she was a pop star.’ It was more, ‘She was a pop star, then she got pissed for five years with an old man.’ I think that was the lasting image when I walked into an audition room.” She giggles. “Older man. Not old man. He’s an old man now, but then, so am I.”

She is talking about Chris Evans, whom she married in Vegas when she was 18 and he was 35. (They split up when she was 21 and divorced in 2007, though remain close friends.) The way she talks about it now makes it sound like a happy time. She nods. “Loved it. Loved that time. Learned so much. Really needed it, after the experiences that I’d had, leading up to that point. And I felt like I’d actually found a real friend. I guess meeting someone who had experienced [fame] for 20 years, at that level, it was very nurturing. And also very drunken, which I needed. I had a lot of fun during those years.”

Even so, the “baggage” took a long time to finally fall away. She did Doctor Who, alongside Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant. “Anyone who liked Doctor Who was drawn to the character, and that was great. Although it made me very famous again, which I had an issue with.” She left in 2008, though continues to dip in and out of that world, most recently with an audiobook series. “Then I felt very rebellious and wanted to do something completely different, so I did Secret Diary.” Secret Diary of a Call Girl – ITV’s raucous adaptation of Belle de Jour’s memoirs of a high-end sex worker – ran for four seasons, and was popular, though more with viewers than with critics.

It is where Piper first met Prebble, who created and wrote on the show and who pitched Piper the idea, though Prebble left after two series. “It actually had legs to be something really quite interesting,” Piper says now. “And it became more about clothes and silly sex.” She has said in the past that she worried doing the show might damage her career, and I wonder if she feels like it did. “Yeah, absolutely. I think on some level it really was very hard for me to move beyond that. So you know, I had to sort of get rid of all of that.”

In 2016, Piper starred in a play called Yerma, at the Young Vic in London, and it was a huge turning point in her career. “It changed a lot of things for me,” she says. She had done theatre work before; she met her second husband, Laurence Fox, when they starred together in Treats at the Garrick Theatre in London in 2007. (Before the interview I’m told that, for legal reasons, she can’t discuss Fox, whom she divorced in 2016 and who is the father of her two sons; over the last few years he has become a vocal “anti-woke” campaigner and their relationship seems fraught, to say the least.) Piper worked with Prebble again in The Effect, at the National in London. But Yerma seems to have been the one that finally let her, as she says, “get rid of all of that”.

The play is about a woman who is unable to have a child, and it put Piper through the wringer; she won every acting gong going for it, taking home all six best actress awards on the theatre circuit in 2016 and 2017, a feat never managed before or since. “I started Yerma at a really tricky time in my personal life, and it felt like I needed it.” The play transferred to New York, where she was acclaimed all over again by US theatre critics. Was she ever tempted by a move to the US? “Yeah, but every time I went out there, I wanted it all for 10 days, then it just started to feel sinister.” Also, she says, she doesn’t like leaving her kids for long. “It’s a problem for my agent, but I just can’t do it. It’s one of those things I’ve kicked into the long grass, and may never do. I don’t know.”

* * *

Perhaps the biggest curveball of her career, the biggest swerve away from teen pop star and teatime telly icon, was Piper’s directorial debut, Rare Beasts, which came out in 2021. It is a theatrical, excoriating film that looks at self-loathing women, men who hate women, and desperate anxieties about childhood and being a parent. It took years to get made, in part, she explains, because it was such a hard sell. “There were the usual things, of people not being likable, and it being … quite relentlessly upsetting,” she says, and laughs.

I wonder, too, if people were surprised that this was the film she had in her. “Obviously, I know myself, so it’s no surprise to me, but I guess other people might find it a bit like, ‘Oh yeah, she’s a miserable fucking bitch.’” She laughs and laughs. “This is a major downer!”

Is she a miserable fucking bitch? “No!” she says. “I think I am interested in and fascinated by the darkness of things. But I also love how funny those things are.” It’s why she feels she has met her match in Prebble. Both Rare Beasts and I Hate Suzie are, she admits, demanding. “They are reach-through-the-screen-and-shake-you demanding.” The Billie Piper of the current era seems not un-delighted by this idea.

Piper hurt her back when filming some of the dance scenes for I Hate Suzie Too, and then hurt it again at a promotional photoshoot for the series; for a while she couldn’t walk. She is still recovering from an operation to fix a bulging disc. “The last couple of months have been pretty gruelling, for a number of reasons,” she says, which might explain why, when I ask her what she’s doing next, she sighs deeply and says she doesn’t know. “The thought of filming seems like a lot,” she says. “But I feel like I’ve got a few ideas to start writing something.”

Besides, she’s got to do Christmas first. She is planning something “huge”. “It starts early in my house, and it lasts until the end of January. I fucking love Christmas,” she says, lighting up. “I know that might be hard to hear, considering …”

That you’re a miserable fucking bitch?

“That I’m a miserable fucking bitch!” she hoots. “But I come alive at Christmas.”

• All episodes of I Hate Suzie Too will be available on Sky Atlantic and NOW from 20 December.

• This article was amended on 3 December 2022. The production of Yerma in which Piper appeared was at the Young Vic, not the National.